Misery Loves Company

The leaders of the alliance meet to discuss the energy shortage ...

Oil production has dropped below expectations...

The price of gasoline has doubled and may soar higher ...

These may sound like Western news reports, but, in fact, they all described events in the Communist world last week. While President Carter met with leaders of six other industrial nations in Tokyo, the Soviet Union's Premier Aleksei Kosygin was conferring with the leaders of the ten nations in the Soviet-led Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON). The chief problem: Soviet oil production, the largest in the world and chief source of COMECON supply, has fallen 23 million bbl. over five months. Actually, Soviet production was supposed to increase by 154 million bbl. this year to a total of 4.3 billion bbl. The continuing shortage, which has slowed Communist industry for two years, caused a doubling in gas prices last year--to the equivalent of between 830 and $1.10 per gal.--and there were rumors of another doubling as early as this week.

The Soviet Communist Party's Central Committee solved the shortage by simply ordering the Soviet oil industry to meet its quota by the end of the year. Whether that order will be fulfilled remains uncertain, but Pravda last week sounded a note familiar to Western readers: "Let every person who produces fuel or uses electrical or fuel energy ask himself: Has he done everything to raise production and avoid waste?"

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